29 June 2012 7:39 AM

Barack Obama was the clear winner in the Supreme Court’s dramatic five to four decision over the Orwellian-named Affordable Care Act – better known as Obamacare on both Right and Left.

The bottom line is that Obama looked like he was about to have the signature legislative achievement of his term struck down as unconstitutional. That didn’t happen and the reform on which he spent virtually all his political capital remains law.

But Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion contains a sting in the tail that could well spell real danger for Obama in his November re-election bid. Rather than judging the law constitutional under the Commerce Clause, Roberts stated that it was a tax.

As he rammed his bill through Congress without a single Republican vote, Obama argued strenuously that fines levied for not taking out health insurance were not a tax.

In September 2009, Obama told ABC News: ‘For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.

‘What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase.’

Well, the Supreme Court does. And as President George H.W. Bush could attest, presidents who promise not to raise taxes and then do so are apt to be punished by American voters.

Mitt Romney clearly grasped this when he immediately said in response to the judgment:’ It's bad policy today. Obamacare was bad law yesterday. It’s bad law today. Let me tell you why I say that. Obamacare raises taxes on the American people by approximately $500 billion.’

Nearly two-thirds of Americans do not like Obamacare. In 2010, the main issue in the mid-term elections was Obamacare: more than 50 Democrats lost their seats and Republicans scored their biggest mid-term victory for over half a century.

It was probably for the best that the Supreme Court did not overturn a law crafted by a democratically-elected president and passed by Congress. As Roberts made clear, he was viewing the matter legally, not politically – whether Obamacare is good policy is a matter for the voters.

In the hours after the decision, Romney raised some $2 million. Opposition to Obamacare, like almost nothing else, unites and energises Republicans.

Romney, with his Massachusetts baggage, is an imperfect messenger on healthcare. But the Roberts tax argument plays right into his hands by linking Obamacare to the economy.

In a time of economic hardship with rising unemployment why did Obama raise taxes to achieve the Left's dream of universal healthcare? That's a potent question for Romney to ask in the final four months of this campaign.

The decision deprives the Left in a single stroke of its argument that Obama needs to be re-elected so he can appoint liberal judges to a Supreme Court controlled by Right-wing zealots. It also gives Romney a very clear message of 'repeal and replace'.

A striking down of Obamacare would have been a distaster for Obama. But in the longer-term, his victory might well prove to be a Pyrrhic one.

Some conservatives are already calling Obama's healthcare reform 'Obamatax' rather than 'Obamacare'. If Romney adopts that description, he makes the reform sound altogether less benign and he links the healthcare debate to his core message about the economy.

Roberts may have enraged many conservatives by refusing to kill Obamacare. But if he become known ultimately as the father of Obamatax he may well have handed Romney an election gift.

Share this article:

18 June 2012 6:27 PM

By any standards, President Barack Obama has had a horrible past fortnight or so. Unemployment rose to 8.2 percent, he told struggling Americans that "the private sector is doing fine" and he sought to relaunch his campaign with a rambling, whiny, nothing-new 54-minute speech that was panned even by many of his supporters.

That speech was on Thursday. But on Friday Obama showed what he, as President of the United States, could do. As Mitt Romney was starting a battleground bus tour in New Hampshire, Obama changed the subject - he announced that up to 800,000 illegal immigrants could remain in America.

It was a clever move by Obama. It at once exposed: Romney's "Etch A Sketch" on immigration following his "self-deportation" talk in the primaries; the inaction of Congress; the split within the GOP on the issue; the nativist sentiments of some Republicans, which turn off independents.

Obama announces his new immigration policy in the Rose Garden. Photo: AFP/Getty.

With Senator Marco Rubio about to draft legislation advocating a very similar move, Obama outmanoeuvred Romney and put him in a bind: slam Obama and Romney looked churlish and cruel, and risked alienating Hispanics; agree with him and he contradicted primary Mitt and alienated part of the GOP base.

News about Romney's bus tour and his attacks on Obama over the economy were completely drowened out.

So what did Romney do? Well, for nearly six hours on Friday, he did nothing, opting to make no comment at all. Then, he rather uncomfortably echoed what Rubio had said several hours before: that the actual policy sort of made sense but it was introduced in a political way that would made a comprehensive solution more difficult.

On CBS's Face the nation yesterday, Romney declined to answer repeated questions about whether he would keep Obama's new policy if Congress didn't act (hardly a far-fetched scenario). It was clear that he wanted to talk about something, anything else.

The problem with Romney's non-response on the immigration question is that it looks just as political as Obama's announcement of a new executive policy five months before an election in which Hispanic votes in Florida, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico could decide whether he's re-elected.

While the election is will turn principally on the economy and be much more about Obama than Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee can't duck difficult questions or talk about only what he wants to talk about. And Hispanics in those swing states matter, as do the views of swing voters (likely to be moderate on immigration) across the country.

Democrats are right to be panicking and, as Al Hunt suggests here, the Obama campaign might well be in need of an intervention. But Obama used the power of his office on Friday to knock Romney off balance. And Romney's failure to respond coherently shows that he can be unsteady on his feet - something that shoudl concern Republicans.

Share this article:

01 June 2012 10:33 PM

If Mitt Romney turfs Barack Obama out of the Oval Office in November, then we might well look back on today and say that this was the day that the 44th President of the United States lost his bid for re-election.

The jobs numbers were appalling - just 69,000 jobs added last month, unemployment clmbing to 8.2 per cent and the ranks of the long-term unemployed swelling by 300,000. As Jim ﻿﻿﻿﻿Pethokoukis of AEI notes, if the Obama administration hadn't slashed the numbers looking for jobs, unemployment would be 10.9 per cent.

Unemployment among young people is over 12 per cent, with a knock-on effect across the country as twenty-somethings continue to live with their parents. Barely any recent economic indicator has been good. Today, the Dow plummeted, wiping out its 2012 gains.

Obama's strategy against Romney is to seek to disqualify his opponent by painting him as an out-of-touch rich guy who robbed the poor and (below the radar) subscribes to a "weird" religion that puts him outside the American mainstream (kind of like the way some racist types have tried to portray Obama as "other").

Romney is a flip flopper who will change his mind on anything, the Obama argument goes, while at the same time being a hard-Right extremist. Though it's hard to believe both things at the same time.

The Obama attacks on Romney's Bain Capital record could go down as one of the most inept campaign strategies in modern history. Major Cory Booker of New Jersey branded them as "nauseating" before being strong-armed into apologising. He was backed up by Harold Ford, former US Senator for Tennessee.

Ed Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor and DNC chair called the ads "very disappointing". Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts described Bain as "a perfectly fine company" whose role had been "distorted".

And then none other than President Bill Clinton weighed in last night, saying: "I don’t think we ought to get in a position where we say this is bad work. This is good work."

He even declared Romney to be ready to be President: "There’s no question that in terms of getting up and going to the office and, you know, basically performing the essential functions of the office, a man who’s been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold."

So centrist Democrats view the attacks on Bain as anti-capitalist. Clinton spent a lot of time and effort in the 1990s making the Democratic party more business-friendly and he is clearly dismayed that Obama's strident, populist rhetoric will be about as effective as Al Gore's "people versus the powerful" message a dozen years ago.

Not only that but they play into Romney's biggest strength - his business record. Surprising as it might seem to former community organisers, most Americans like capitalism and respect those who can succeed in it.

Mark too the words of Artur Davis, a former congressman I first covered in Alabama 10 years ago. A big Obama booster as a Congressman in 2008, he has now bolted the Democratic party and become a Republican. His former party, he said, was no longer "inclusive, vibrant, and open-minded", it was no longer the party of the Kennedys and it was "not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party (and he knows that even if he can’t say it)".

As an aside, it's worth noting that Booker, Ford, Patrick and Davis are all black and were considered part of a new wave of more centrist, pragmatic and unifying figures than the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Four years ago, that's how Obama was viewed. Not now.

The RealClearPolitics national poll average put Obama at 2.2 per cent ahead of Romney. That's statistically insignificant, and also based in part on an outlying Fox News poll that put Obama up seven (his margin of victory over John McCain in 2008), which no one believes.

Much has been made of Obama's supposed electoral college advantages. But the path to victory for Romney is clear and within his grasp: win all the states McCain won in 2008 plus Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia and Ohio plus any one of New Hampshire, Iowa, Wisconsin, Colorado or New Mexico. There are other permutations.

The problems for Obama are stacking up. Not only is there the economy - and even if that gets better, this is the period when people's perceptions become set in aspic - but there's an inept campaign strategy and a tilt to the Left that is likely to alienate moderates and independents.

As John Podhoretz argues persuasively, Obama seems unable to make a case for why he should be re-elected, as Reagan, Clinton and Bush 43 did. Simply being Barack Obama, the personification of people's vague dreams, is no longer enough.

Obama's rambling, responsibility-dodging address in Minnesota showed that while his beautiful words may have been ideally fitted for the 2008 election, speechifying not do it this time around. Contrast it with Romney's relentless hammering of his jobs message on CBNC shortly beforehand and you can see why more thoughtful Democrats are getting very, very concerned.

There's another thing that could do Obama down and Artur Davis put his finger on it in a very perceptive blog post last week - arrogance. The Obama campaign just cannot conceive how Romney can win. As Davis puts it, they have "disdain" for Republicans.

This is "partly the reflex of Chicago-bred operatives who found John McCain’s campaign soft and clumsy", Davis wrote, but "mostly it is the product of a worldview that sees conservatism as neither trendy nor clever, and as the fading gasp of a whiter, duller society".

Recent weeks have shown that Republican voters hacve eagerly swung behind Romney, albeit mainly because of their determination to oust Obama rather than love for the presumptive nominee. The Romney campaign is proving its toughness- refusing to bow to calls to disavow this or that surrogate and launching a guerrilla raid on Solyndra.

Romney wants to make the campaign all about the economy and all about Obama. There is little doubt that Obama wants to talk about anything other than the economy but at the same time he finds it very difficult to depart from the "all about me" theme that has characterised his entire political career.

Put all this together and what have we got? Romney must now be considered the narrow favourite in November. Of course, Obama could well be re-elected. But this feels like a moment similar to the one in mid-December 2007 when Obama began to eclipse Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.

We are now seeing a very different race from the one Obama or the Washington cognoscenti ever anticipated. Things can change very quickly but Mitt Romney has just become the 2012 front-runner.

Share this article:

TOBY HARNDEN

Toby Harnden is a US Executive Editor of Mail Online and the Daily Mail’s US Editor. A British citizen by birth and American citizen by choice, he is based in Washington DC and has reported on the US politics for more than a dozen years. He became a journalist after serving as a Royal Navy officer and has covered the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well as being imprisoned in Zimbabwe. More details are on his website here. You can email him at toby.harnden@dailymail.co.uk, follow him on Twitter @tobyharnden and on Facebook. He is the author of the bestseller Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story of Britain's War in Afghanistan.